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Web 2.0 or SOA? Web 2.0 and SOA? Let the Debate Begin! - Part 2

Software architecture and author Joel Spolsky has decried all the Web 2.0 talk as an example of the blather of “architecture astronautics,” or a “meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite.” The tip-off is “the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!" Now, all the bombast is around “tagging and folksonomies and syndication, and we're all supposed to fall in line with the theory that cool new stuff like Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us are somehow bigger than the sum of their parts. The Long Tail! Attention Economy! Creative Commons! Peer production! Web 2.0!”

Spolsky added, “the term Web 2.0 …has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.”

Nick Carr also has waded into the Web 2.0 debate, with an ongoing dialogue with Harvard professor and Web 2.0 proponent Andrew McAfee. Carr, a leading skeptic of all things IT, doesn’t share McAfee's enthusiasm for “Enterprise 2.0” (as the name suggests, the business side of Web 2.0), and notes that previous attempts to automate knowledge management – the core of what Web 2.0 offers – have been abject failure stories.

(McAfee’s article is posted here . A related Weblog is posted here .)

Web 2.0 may follow the path of previous technologies, in which “big companies have dumped a lot of money into computer systems that promise to automate ‘knowledge management,’” Carr writes. “Most of that money has been wasted. No matter how technologically elegant their design, knowledge management ‘platforms’ and ‘repositories’ tend to quickly collapse under the weight of their own complexity. Using them turns out to be more trouble than it's worth - particularly for those employees who have the most valuable knowledge - and the platforms and repositories fall into disuse and are eventually, and quietly, dismantled. People go back to using efficient, direct conversations - through meetings, or phone calls, or emails, or instant messages - to exchange useful knowledge.”

Some take the middle ground, observing that that there will be a convergence taking place between the two approaches in the future. Some even conclude that there actually is a natural synergy between Web 2.0 and SOA, and lo and behold, Web 2.0 is actually evolving into a “Global SOA.” One of the leading proponents of this idea has been Dion Hinchcliffe, who makes the case that enterprises will increasingly internalize Web 2.0 from the cloud to meet integration requirements for their particular needs.

“If you do a superficial comparison at least, Web 2.0 is all about autonomous, distributed services, remixability, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. And yet, SOA is all about, you guessed it, autonomous, distributed services, composite functionality, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. Is Web 2.0 actually the most massive instance possible of service-oriented architecture, realized on a worldwide scale and sprawling across the Web? The answer folks is, apparently so.”

Gartner’s Nick Gall agrees that the answer may lie somewhere in between, proposing that a Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) may emerge as a “lightweight version of SOA.” As its name suggests, WOA is centered around REST, built on HTTP and XML. (Hinchcliffe writes about Gall’s WOA vision here, calling it “the SOA within reach.”)

However, John O’Shea warns that “nobody has yet mentioned how early WOA [Web-Oriented Architecture] adapters will end up with a JBOWS [just a bunch of Web services] architecture instead of a WOA, as has happened to some early SOA adapters. WOA doesn’t seem to offer anything to help alleviate this tendancy - if anything it may well suffer from it even more.”

The bottom line is that while Web 2.0 and SOA have their differences, it’s not an either/or choice to use one or the other. The entrepreneurial energy and passion the Web 2.0ers are exuding is wonderful stuff. However, SOA is not as moribund as it’s now being portrayed. SOA itself is a process of creative destruction, which breaks complex or legacy processes and applications down to an atomic level so they can be reconstituted, on demand, into new shapes and sizes. Most organizations, in fact, are not ready for the scope of such changes.

As Gartner’s Loek Bakker put it : “WS-* services and REST services are not competing, they are complementary. [REST] serves another purpose than SOA. Consumer-facing services have other QoS requirements than high-volume, cross-platform A2A transaction services. One service needs to be simple and flexible, while another service should seamlessly integrate with different platforms. Different requirements ask for different services, which in turn ask for different implementations. That is the reality of today's IT world."

Summarizing the points raised in this fierce new debate, it may help to keep these basic tenets in mind:

• Keep it simple, reduce complexity, and keep the needs of end-users out in front.

• Despite the hype, Web 2.0 has a lot to offer the business; leverage it as much as possible.

• Despite the hype, SOA has a lot to offer the business; leverage it as much as possible.

• Apply SOAP Web services where they best fit the needs of end users.

• Apply REST Web services where they best fit the needs of end users.